HW7
Homework 7
Due a week after the first class at 11:59 pm
Read the assigned articles in D2L. Answer the questions below. The answers must demonstrate that you have substantively engaged with the material and you haven’t simply goggled the question and copy/pasted the answer.
1. What is your favorite interactional (play with at least one other person) board game? Are there any interactions in this game that mimic a cybersecurity situation or interaction? How so?
2. Consider an immigration situation in which immigrants can freely enter a country, and those already there are free to leave. Can immigration into such a country be considered “zero sum” in terms of available work and number of workers? Why or why not?
3. Think of a game that you play against other players (or against a computer). How might you represent an aspect of that game in a game theory framework?
4. A company has fallen prey to a ransomware attack. The authors of the ransomware are demanding $10,000 in ransom. The company’s IT department is faced with the choice of paying the ransom to regain control of their systems, or restoring systems from backup, which will cost $20,000. Explain the situation in terms of game theory. What are the tradeoffs in this situation?
Simulation 3
You will be playing six games against a computer opponent. For the purposes of this assignment, you should play at least 10 rounds in each game. Your goal in each game is to maximize the number of points you get over those rounds. After each move you make, the system will tell you how many rounds you have played and your score.
https://wsray3.casl.umd.edu/cv313/sim11/index.html
The six games can be played in any order, and they are:
1. Playing as a hacker where the costs of attack and defense are the same (Hacker, equal)
2. Playing as an analyst where the costs of attack and defense are the same (Analyst, equal)
3. Playing as a hacker where analysts get a bonus for detecting attacks (Hacker, +Analyst)
4. Playing as an analyst where analysts get a bonus for detecting attacks (Analyst, +Analyst)
5. Playing as a hacker where hackers get a bonus for attacking undefended systems (Hacker, +Hacker)
6. Playing as an analyst where hackers get a bonus for attacking undefended systems (Analyst, +Hacker)
In each of these games, please answer the questions listed below.
1. Based on the cost structure for this game, what did you expect your opponent to do most often?
2. What did you score in this game? What did your opponent score? Over how many rounds?
3. For this game, did you play any particular strategy? Why?
4. Did your opponent play certain actions more or less than you expected? Why do you think that was?
5. Did the value of certain actions you could take influence how you played in this game?
6. Did the value of certain actions your opponent could take influence how you played in this game?
7. What kind of situation in the real world would the cost structure in this game correspond to?
8.
Answer the following questions for the simulation as a whole:
1. How does the cost structure affect what people do?
2. How well does this situation translate to the real world? Why?
3. What goes into a cost structure in the real world?
4. If you were building a simulation like this, how would you make the cost structure better?
Page | 1